cre8d design

Great to see Southwest Airlines blogging with a cute name and design. Their first post sets the tone:

For us, the experience is a lot like going on a blind date – will our readers like us? Can we find something to talk about? And most importantly, will they come back again to post their own messages? We promise that we are a lot more fun than most blind dates… Well at least we hope so, and we hope that you are as Nuts about Southwest as we are. Our goal is to earn a bookmark on your browser, or even better, a RSS feed on your reader, by making our corporate blog interesting, timely, and FUN for all involved. We look at this blog as the place where our Employees “come out to play,â€? and we hope you will join us on the playground with this blog by posting your own comments. We are really excited to show the blogosphere a behind the scenes viewpoint of our folks.

Our goal is for this blog to go beyond the facts and numbers to give you insight into our fantastic Employees—what motivates them, how they do their jobs, and a look into the way they serve you, our Customers.

They’re using WordPress too

We talked about this exact sort of blog, amongst others, in our talk to the New Zealand Marketing Association last year.

I’d love to see (or discover) a blog about plane travel stories – not about the trips per se, but about why people are flying – airports are so full of emotions and stories just waiting to be discovered. The crazy running-late-for-the-plane stories, the people you sit next to and realise you both know someone, the small details.

If I was wanting to write a book, I’ve imagined sitting for a few days in an airport, watching the world go by.

Don’t get me wrong – I love and use some of the tools from the Web 2.0 era every day. del.icio.us enables me to file away stuff I might need in future and find helpful tech resources (with better results than Google). I have bursts of using Flickr, Last.fm, co.mments. After trying a tonne of different online feed readers with “cutting edge features”, I went back to Bloglines. I’ve found Basecamp invaluable for keeping organised. I sometimes point people over to PXN8 or Pixoh if they don’t have an image editing program on their computer.

But reading TechCrunch, Mashable and so on has lately become less exciting for me. The Web 2.0 list is massive – and there are many people bringing out similar sites and services.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s a better system out there than the one I’m using for a particular task (e.g. social bookmarking) and I’ll go looking and try out a new system. Either I don’t give it enough time to realise the benefits, or I don’t need all those extra benefits or I’m too entrenched in the simplicity of the tool I currently use.

Being bombarded with new sites and services constantly (if you’re a subscriber to quite a few Web 2.0 sites) might actually be less beneficial. Sometimes there’s nothing like word of mouth from people who’ve become converts to the system, rather than people just reviewing them. The true test of the value of one of these sites is it becomes part of your life, your habits. We can all be wowed by features the first time we meet them, but are they actually beneficial?

The same goes for all the blog plugins – yes they may wow us but are they actually beneficial to the site’s visitors, or do they clutter things up and make things more complicated than necessary? We often wonder about features we would like added to our favourite sites. Have you ever wondered about features (not ads, heh) you’d like removed from those sites – things you find get in the way, things you never use.

Typical – gets to Easter (usually the start of the cold weather) and I get sick. Back soon.